Blue Varanasi

We travelled 2 days on the train, 2 days and half almost 3.

We had a booked sleeper seat on the train to Bombay, but from there we had to hope to find a seat.
Because the train was packed and there was no room for anybody we had to pretend that I was pregnant and sick and that we were married and this way an officer made sure that we had a seat were I could rest. This embaracing idea came obviously from Nico who kept saying, -try to look sick please, look sick!-

The time I spent in the train with Nico we spent knowing eachother a little better and it was a little scary sometimes to see how many things we had in common. Normally I dont trust people who are too much like me (I wonder why...) but with Nico it was astonishing! Fortunately he made sure that I was cracking from laughing all the time, which made the time run really fast and forget the similarities.

In the train we were very little left alone, in a moment there were 6 people sitting on a 3 people seat just in front of us, which only stared and stared and stared and went on staring for hours, 'till Nico started his show-WE ARE ON TV!!!!!!!!- that made me laugh so shamelessy that I guess the indians felt too embaraced for me -tears coming from my eyes- to keep looking.

We arrived in Varanasi pretty late at night, checked in the first guest house available by the Hanuman Ghat and after a fat cream joint we went to bed.

The day after we had breakfast in the guest house (habit that I never had before but with Nico it became infact a habit) we moved to have a look at the ghats on the Ganga and there, in front of the holy river I heard so much about and read about when I was so little, in front of it I just could not stop crying. Well Varanasi has been this to me .
I felt so skinless I was so sensitive to any good and any bad- I felt that I was in the center of the world where all the bad and all the good gathers and co-exists.
The smells even were so contraddicting, you could smell shit and a second after a sweet incence parfume and flowers and food and then shit again all in the space of 30 seconds. there were people trying to sell u everything and beggars and babas and children with coloured pigments getting ready for HOLY, a real casba a fucking mess provoking the most opposite feelings.
We found by chance a very very beautifull place, Vishnu GH where we took a blue room on the high terrace with view on the Ganga.
After we cheched out with some troubles from the Hanuman Ghat we moved into our blue room that gave me a sense of joy from the very first glance.
On the terrace we could see hundreds of birds flying on the river, drowing fantastic geometries in the sky also very blue and plunging down till the edge of the water and up again- I spent long time observing them and trying to immagine if I was a bird...

Our days in Varanasi were more or less like this > after a breackfast on the terrace under the blue sky and the fanastic birds we would go explore the ghats, looking for stuff to smoke and try to get an idea of the town that seemed to be the the center of the universe.
The visit to the Burning Ghats was fast and intense, the smell of burnt flesh mixed with flowers and incense and the feeling was weird. I felt like in Varanasi I could take everything, the death and the life, the beauy and the horrors, in the burning ghats I felt petrified by the pain of the relatives of the deaths that was not really pain, everybody seemed to accept death as the naural thing that it is, so under the sky, so clear and exposed. Indeed very different from our culture that tends to bann the argument like a taboo. All this I found very confronting. Pain that was no pain really upset my mind, but it was a silent and quite way of upsetting it, it was like a silent and sweet inner explosion.
In this confusional state of mind and seduced by life at once, and by death too,we looked for all the possible things available to get fully stoned and we did find the most assorted choise of drugs.
In the afternoons we returned to our quite Ganga looking room to paint and rest and talk and dig dig dig as much as possible to make the intensiy of the experience even more intense, if possible, and at a certain point, a very high one I have to confess, Cort, the sax player of Hampy shows up!!!He wrote me he was in Varanasi and I just mailed him the name of my guest house.
Useless to say how happy I was to see him!

He moved in the same Guest house and spent his time toying with the stones he just grew interested in, he brought us stones, saxophone notes and to me memories.

On the terrace I could play my pois and the staff, which helped me to balance the most unbalancable feeling I was experiencing, I felt like I was surfing at the edge of the world, and like the experience with the cobra, I felt nothing bad could happen to me. The fact that I was drowing again made me feel even stronger and those uncountable days in Varanasi I will always take with me.

Those days my feelings towards Nico grew very strong and even though they lacked any future perspective I felt really thankfull for the moment I was living. If somebody would have asked me to make a wish I would have been unable to formulate one, because all I needed I had, and although with Nico we spoke much about the future I could not care less of it.

In those days we formulated the project of working together on a theme, once in Europe, and organize a exibition of our works somewhere.
The theme > Le Voyage et les rencontres.

The last night in Varanasi we took a boat trip on the Ganga at sunset and we did our pujas. It has been a very sweet goodbye to the town.

We left Varanasi- a bit weak from the experience but fully charged in spirit- to reach the holy town at the feet the Himalayas, Risickesh, where the Ganga is clear and fresh and people go to learn yoga.